"It's expensive and it doesn't age": Why Ken Levine didn't aim for realistic graphics in BioShock, and won't for Judas either

Not that Judas will look like a dog's dinner

While there has always been a portion of the games industry that's pushed and pushed for the cutting edge of graphics, using only the prettiest polygons and most verdant vertices in their games, Bioshock director Ken Levine hasn't got much time for graphical realism: "It's expensive and it doesn't age".

That's not to say Judas, his narratively-flexible immersive sim follow up to Bioshock, will look like a dog's dinner, rather he's making an argument for style over photorealism.

"I don't think we've ever been a company that was like 'oh my god, we need the latest and greatest technology," Levine told IGN in a recent interview. "Outside of SWAT 4, we never really tried to do ultra realism in our games. It's expensive and it doesn't age. BioShock still looks good because it wasn't trying to get every nut and bolt super realistically rendered. It was a style."

Levine says that new gaming technology coming out actually reflects this thinking. Previous console generations were all about leaping ahead on what could be rendered graphically, but there's a rising number that are more interested in form factor. "If you look at, say, the Switch 2 and the new Steam Machine coming out, those are not massive technological upgrades," Levine says. "That wasn't their strategy. People are realising that we've hit a bit of diminishing returns with that. If you have the right art director and the right approach, you don't need to be on the cutting edge of technology all the time."

When it comes to Judas, the first-person shooter where you're battling for an against three vying factions on a generation ship, the years it's spent in development haven't been about making technological advances, Levine says. "The stuff we're doing in Judas, the narrative stuff, is not CPU intensive: it's work intensive on our side." Judas is a game that shifts and changes to reflect the choices you make as you play. Playthroughs will diverge from any linear story depending on which factions you support and which you fight.

Levine likens it to Larian's work on Baldur's Gate 3. "None of it was particularly technologically demanding," he says. "It's just a billion branching tree structures that they had to manage and think about. I can only tip my hat to those guys because they did an amazing job with it. But that's not a technological challenge. It's an engineering and thought challenge and a huge amount of work."

Judas is similar, Levine says: "Judas is just a huge amount of [work]. The organization of assets and tagging things and looking for certain minor game conditions and combinatorial game conditions to trigger other events that are responsive to player action."

Certainly, the number of form-pushing games we've seen in the past decade that have had little to do with the realism or fidelity of their graphics would support what Levine is saying. Though, when the Steam Machine was announced – and perhaps this is because I was hanging out in the wrong forums – a lot of chatter seemed to be about how its graphics card was already out of date.

That said, even if choosing a less technologically-demanding path in the games you make is a reasoned argument to make, with the growing cost of RAM and other components, even less advanced hardware is still seeing prices rise. And the Steam Machine, which may be aiming to run the large market of less-demanding games, still doesn't have a release date because its price tag is in such flux.